Harrison Storms

• 1. Introduction

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  Harrison Allen Storms, Jr. was born on the 15th of July 1915, and by the time he died on the 11th of July 1992, just four days before his birthday, he had helped put human beings on the Moon. He was known inside North American Aviation simply as "Stormy." The questions worth asking about him are not the triumphant ones. They are the harder ones: how does a man who built the Apollo spacecraft end his career in obscurity? And what does that say about the price of reaching the Moon?

• 2. Boy Scouts to Von Karman

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  Storms grew up on Chicago's North Shore, in Wilmette, as the son of a traveling salesman. As a boy he built model airplanes and joined the Boy Scouts. He attended Northwestern University, graduated at the top of his class, and stayed on for a master's degree in mechanical engineering. Then he went further west, to the California Institute of Technology, to study aeronautical engineering under the legendary Theodore von Karman. That lineage mattered. Von Karman was among the most influential figures in the history of aerospace science, and his stamp on Storms carried through to the work that followed. Storms joined North American Aviation and, in 1955, successfully led the company's bid for the contract to design and build the X-15. Two years later, he was named chief engineer of North American's Los Angeles division.

• 3. Winning Apollo

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  In 1960, Storms was offered the chance to lead North American's Missile Division, which at that moment held exactly one contract: the AGM-28 Hound Dog missile. Dutch Kindelberger and Lee Atwood gave him the opening to push the company into spaceflight. On the 11th of September 1961, North American won the contract for the S-II second stage of the Saturn V rocket. Storms found that achievement satisfying but insufficient. He was also pursuing the contract for the Apollo spacecraft itself, and on the 28th of November 1961 North American won that too. Through the work of his team and NAA Marketing VP Tom Dixon, Storms came to be called "the father of Apollo" inside the company. His management team, nicknamed "the Storm Troopers," included Harold Raynor, Charlie Feltz, Dale Myers, Scott Crossfield, and a dozen other engineers and specialists. When 1962 began, North American's workforce on the program stood at around 7,000 employees. Within the first six months of that year it had grown to 14,000.

• 4. The Weight of the Work

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  The S-II common bulkhead was one of the most consequential engineering decisions of the Apollo program. According to those who knew the work, if Storms had not pushed hard on that design, the Saturn V would not have been able to lift the weight of an alternative configuration, and there would have been no Moon landing within the decade. The spacecraft itself was described by those with hands-on experience as a labyrinth of systems more complicated than an aircraft carrier, all compressed into a space roughly the size of a phone booth. By the mid-1960s, Storms was presiding over a workforce spread across a hundred locations, totaling 35,000 people. The ambition of the undertaking was enormous; so were the pressures bearing down on every deadline and every component.

• 5. Phillips, Shea, and the Cracks

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  In late 1965, NASA's Apollo program director Samuel C. Phillips sent a "tiger team" to North American to investigate delays and cost overruns. In early 1966, Phillips sent a critical report to his superiors and to Lee Atwood, documenting problems and demanding corrective steps. Spacecraft CSM-011, used in a second uncrewed suborbital test, was delivered to Cape Kennedy in 1966 carrying problems that delayed its flight by one month. Troubles with the S-II and CSM-017 pushed the first Saturn V test flight from late 1966 to November 1967. Storms' working relationship with NASA's Apollo Spacecraft Program Office manager Joseph Shea was strained. Storms believed that NASA itself bore some of the blame, arguing that the agency had delayed key design decisions and kept making significant changes after construction had already begun. He felt Shea did not understand the realities of manufacturing. Shea himself was eventually removed as ASPO manager.

• 6. Apollo 1 and the End

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  CSM-012, assigned to Apollo 1 as the first crewed flight, had accumulated serious problems with electrical wiring and ethylene glycol plumbing. On the 27th of January 1967, a fire broke out in the capsule during a launch rehearsal at Cape Kennedy, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. After the fire, NASA Administrator James Webb demanded the resignation of either Lee Atwood or Storms. Atwood chose to reassign Storms instead. The reaction at North American was raw. Secretaries wept. Telephone operators wept. As word moved through the plant, riveters and welders wept. A passage written later captured the feeling: Storms had lifted people out of ordinary lives and put them to work on one of the greatest adventures in history. His workforce of 35,000 felt the removal as an injustice. Storms never returned to any role in aerospace. He died in 1992, just short of his seventy-seventh birthday, in obscurity.

• 7. After Apollo

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  Screenwriter Mike Gray profiled Storms in a 1992 book titled Angle of Attack. Publishers Weekly described it as a swaggering portrait of NASA's Apollo project. In the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, actor James Rebhorn played the role of Storms. Stephen Baxter's alternate history novel Voyage includes a character named J. K. Lee who is described as an amalgam of Storms and Tom Kelly; in the novel, Storms appears as a friend of that character. The book by Gray, published in the same year Storms died, stands as the primary effort to tell his story to a general audience. The timing of that publication, arriving just as Storms himself was dying, closed a particular loop in the history of Apollo.